


An Effort to Babysit

by richmahogany



Category: Criminal Minds, Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Long Before Either Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 10:00:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8368102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/richmahogany/pseuds/richmahogany
Summary: IFT software programmer Harold Wren moves into a new apartment, but soon regrets it, for he is cursed with an over-friendly neighbor. First there was the proverbial borrowing of a cup of sugar, then encounters in the hallway from which he could only extricate himself after 10 minutes of small talk, and then invitations to come in for unwanted cups of coffee. And now, to cap it all, he's being asked to babysit his neighbor's young cousin, a precocious four year old called Spencer.





	

**Author's Note:**

> My very first crossover fic. Also my first Criminal Minds fic, although you can hardly call it that. It just seemed a nice idea to bring those two characters together.

Harold had been living in his new apartment for little over two months, but he was already starting to regret the move. He thought it was a nice gesture when his new neighbor Elaine welcomed him to the block with a home-made cheesecake. In the next few weeks though, he saw more of Elaine than he was comfortable with. First there was the proverbial borrowing of a cup a sugar. Then he realized that every time he encountered her in the hallway, he couldn’t get away under ten minutes, being forced to engage in mindless small talk. Then Elaine started to invite him into her apartment for coffee, so frequently that it would have been rude to turn all the invitations down. Harold didn’t like coffee, and he didn’t like the fact that it was invariably accompanied by more mindless small talk.  
Therefore Harold knew it couldn’t mean anything good when he answered the door on Sunday morning and saw his neighbor Elaine standing there with a young child in tow. He’d seen her with the kid a couple of times already, a small creature of indeterminate gender, about four years old, dressed in jeans and a stripy t-shirt and with a pageboy haircut with long bangs.  
“Oh Harold,” Elaine said as soon as he opened the door, “I need your help, please, can you do me a huge favor? You see, I’ve got my cousin staying with me, well, he’s not really my cousin, I think his grandmother was my mother’s cousin or something, anyway, he’s family, he’s in New York with his mother, but his mother had to go into hospital, and he’s staying with me, but I’ve got to go out today, so please Harold, can you look after him? I’ll be eternally grateful!”  
“Well...” said Harold, rather taken aback by the onslaught.  
“Oh Harold, that’d be so good of you. His name is Spencer. Say hello to Harold, Spencer!” she said, pushing her young relative forward. The boy flinched away from her touch and mumbled “Hello Harold” in the direction of his shoes.  
“Go on in, Spencer, there’s a good boy,” she said, giving the kid another push. The boy squeezed past Harold and went into the apartment, more in an effort to get away from Elaine than from an actual desire to enter, it seemed to Harold.  
“But…” he tried to say, but Elaine talked over him already.  
“Oh thank you, Harold, you’ve saved me! By the way, I should tell you,” – here she lowered her voice – “he’s a bit…you know…”  
She rolled her eyes to demonstrate.  
“No, I don’t know,” said Harold, completely baffled.  
“Well, he’s not quite normal, you know, but I’m sure you’ll be fine.”  
“What?” said Harold, but it was already too late. Elaine was clattering down the stairs with a “bye, Harold, I’ll pick him up tonight”.  
Harold closed the door and went into his apartment with some trepidation. Not quite normal? What did that mean? What was the boy going to do? Throw tantrums? Rip apart his books? Would he not understand what you said to him? Harold hurried into the living room to see what the child was doing.  
He wasn’t doing anything terrible. He just walked slowly around the perimeter of the room, passing his hands over the spines of books, the plant pots, the light switches and whatever else was there. Harold hated it when strangers came into his place and fiddled with his things, but since the boy wasn’t actually touching anything, Harold let him get on with it. He wanted to familiarize himself with a strange place, Harold could understand that. He sat down at the table and took up the newspaper he’d been reading when Elaine rang the doorbell. He didn’t even say anything when Spencer extended his tour of the apartment to every single room, including Harold’s bedroom. If Harold was uncomfortable with strangers in his living room, he was really uncomfortable with someone exploring his bedroom, which was his most private sanctuary. But with a four year old child, he didn’t mind so much. Eventually Spencer had finished his tour and came back into the living room. He hovered near the coffee table, but didn’t do anything. Harold didn’t quite know what to do either. He waited.  
Spencer tried to cautiously approach him, but then retreated to the coffee table. He did this a few times. Clearly he was trying to pluck up the courage to speak to Harold, but Harold didn’t know how to help him. Finally Spencer managed to get his question out:  
“May I read your magazines?” he asked, pointing to the small pile on the coffee table.  
“Of course you may,” said Harold, relieved at the simplicity of the request.  
The boy drifted towards the couch, but hesitated again.  
“You can sit on the couch, or you can sit here at the table,” Harold said.  
The boy indicated the couch, but still didn’t sit down.  
“Sit anywhere you like,” Harold told him. “You can also move the cushions anywhere you want.”  
This finally convinced the boy to grab the magazine on top of the pile, which happened to be “Popular Electronics”, and sit on the couch with it. He then sat there quietly, turning the pages.  
Harold turned the pages of his newspaper, too, but secretly he was watching Spencer. Clearly the kid could read fluently, and he seemed to understand enough what he was reading to keep his interest. This was surprising in a four year old, but Harold himself had made his first forays into his parents’ encyclopedia at that age. Even if he hadn’t understood everything he read at that time, he still remembered the pleasure of poring over pictures and diagrams, trying to figure out want they meant, and Spencer was probably doing the same thing.  
The magazine kept him occupied for a while and when he had finished with “Popular Electronics”, he went on to “Scientific American”.  
Harold for his part tried to get stuck into the business pages, but he couldn’t concentrate. He was still worried about how this day was going to pan out. He didn’t consider himself to be good with children. He always had the feeling that something was expected from him in any interaction with them, but he never knew what. The only child he met regularly was Will, who never hesitated to tell his uncle Harold exactly what he wanted him to do. But Spencer was shy and hesitant to take the initiative, so it would be up to Harold to come up with things to do. Harold was feeling rather helpless. Babysitting a strange child was entirely new to him.  
There was something else that worried him at the back of his mind. The truth was, Harold was afraid of children. The memory of being mocked, bullied and shunned by other kids was so ingrained that fear was an automatic reaction whenever he met a child. Of course this was entirely irrational, and it never happened now that he was an adult, and besides it would never happen with a kid like Spencer, who was the type to be mocked and bullied himself, or would be as soon as he started school. Still, such feelings were very difficult to overcome entirely.  
Harold managed to read some of his newspaper, but eventually Spencer had read all the magazines and was now sitting on the couch, wiggling his feet and fiddling with the tassel on one of the cushions. He was probably waiting for Harold to suggest a new activity, but Harold was at a loss. He desperately tried to think what children commonly did. They played with toys, of course, but Harold didn’t have any toys. They also played games, but Harold didn’t have any games either. Except one. Maybe that would do the trick. And so he asked:  
“Do you like to play chess?”  
It had been the right thing to say. The boy visibly brightened at the suggestion, and they set the board up on the table between them and played.  
Spencer was good, but Harold was better, and since it hadn’t occurred to him to hold back in any way, he had quickly beaten Spencer twice in a row. Seeing that Spencer looked rather downcast, Harold realized that he had made a mistake. Spencer might be able to read science magazines like an adult and play chess like an adult, but he still was a four year old kid, with all the emotional immaturity that implied. Harold was sorry that he hadn’t noticed this earlier, and so he said now:  
“Do you want to play another game? You almost beat me the last time, I think next time you might actually do it.”  
Accordingly he let Spencer win the third game, which seemed to cheer the boy up.  
By now it was lunchtime, and Harold and Spencer went into the kitchen to make some sandwiches. Harold didn’t know what Spencer liked, but solved the problem by putting everything that could possibly be used to make sandwiches onto the kitchen table. There was butter, two types of jam, three kinds of cheese, salami, pastrami and ham. There were also two kinds of bread:  
“You can have either, or both,” he told Spencer, “and if you want it toasted, I’ll do it for you. You can put anything you like on it.”  
Spencer chose a slice of each kind of bread, but declined the offer of toasting. Then he surveyed the spread before him.  
“Do you have peanut butter?” he asked.  
“No, sorry. I only have what you see here.”  
Spencer still couldn’t come to a decision, so Harold decided to help him along.  
“Are you a combination or a permutation eater?” he asked.  
“I don’t know.”  
“You know the difference between combination and permutation?”  
“Yes.”  
“Well, then. If you think it makes a difference if you put cheese on top of jam or jam on top of cheese, you are a permutation eater.”  
Here Spencer actually giggled at the suggestion of jam with cheese, so Harold asked:  
“So what do you like?”  
“I don’t know,” Spencer said again.  
“In that case,” Harold said, “you’ll have to try it out in an experiment. Go on, choose anything you want.”  
Thus encouraged Spencer finally put butter and strawberry jam on one of his slices. Then he cut his second slice in half and put strawberry jam on top of blackberry jam on one piece and blackberry jam on top of strawberry jam on the other. This he declared to be the most satisfactory, and he asked for a third slice which he ate with blackberry on top of strawberry.  
Harold got into the spirit as well with cheese and salami on one slice and cheese and ham on another. He also gave Spencer a glass of orange juice to drink, although he worried slightly about the kid’s sugar intake. Maybe water would have been better, but he reckoned that as a one-time babysitter, it was not his job to watch over Spencer’s diet.  
Suddenly Spencer started talking.  
“Peanuts aren’t really nuts, you know,” he said, “it’s a legume, it’s related to peas and beans. Nuts are defined as getting hard shells when they are ripe, but peanuts don’t get hard shells, so they’re not nuts.”  
Why was Spencer suddenly talking about peanuts? Of course, Harold remembered, they’d mentioned peanut butter only a few minutes ago. And while he listened to a description of how peanuts grow and a list of the world’s biggest peanut producers, he also realized what Spencer was really doing.  
Like Harold himself, Spencer clearly found human interaction difficult, and at his age he hadn’t yet learned to fake it. But that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t want to connect with other human beings, and his lecture was meant to do just that. It was Spencer’s way of communicating, of reaching out. It showed Harold that Spencer was relaxing in his company, that he even started to like Harold a little. And that made Harold like Spencer a lot, too. This day wasn’t going to be as difficult as he had feared.  
When Spencer had finished eating and talking, they cleared the table and went back into the living room. Harold had remembered that he actually had a toy, or a game, or…well, not quite either of them, but something he thought Spencer would like. He brought out a booklet and asked Spencer:  
“Have you ever made a hexaflexagon?”  
Spencer laughed.  
“No!”  
“Well, I’ll show you how. It’s all in this booklet, but we’ll make one together so you can see how.”  
First they covered the table with the newspaper, because Harold wasn’t going to let a four year old loose with scissors and glue without protecting his expensive furniture. Then he cut two strips of leftover wallpaper and showed Spencer how to draw a pattern on it, how to fold it and stick it together and finally how to flex it. Spencer was a bit clumsy with his scissors, but with Harold’s help he soon had a respectable hexaflexagon in his hands and started flexing it enthusiastically. Harold pushed to booklet towards him.  
“Have a look at this. This explains the math behind it, and there’s more, if you want.”  
Spencer certainly wanted, this seemed to be exactly the kind of thing he enjoyed. It kept him occupied for a while.  
Harold meanwhile looked out of the window and noticed that the sun had come out. The morning had been gray and overcast, but the weather had taken a turn for the better. And so, at Harold’s request, Spencer reluctantly put aside his hexaflexagon and joined him for a walk in the park.  
Harold pointed out a bird or two to Spencer, but the boy didn’t seem all that interested. Nevertheless, he treated Harold to a lecture about the migratory habits of various birds, with a bonus excursion on the migratory habits of the Monarch butterfly.  
As they passed an empty school yard, Spencer turned noticeably quiet. Harold saw him cast glances at the school which seemed to him anxious or worried. What was he thinking about?  
“Do you go to school already?” he asked.  
Spencer shook his head.  
“I’ll probably go this fall. My mom is trying to get them to accept me.”  
The prospect didn’t seem to fill him with joy.  
“There doesn’t seem much point in you going into first grade,” Harold said, “you know everything they teach you there already.”  
“They’ll maybe let me skip a couple grades,” Spencer told him. “That’s why we’re in New York, actually. We were supposed to meet this famous doctor or something, someone who works with gifted children and assesses what they can do and stuff.”  
“And what did he say?”  
“We didn’t go, Mom had to go into hospital before we went. I don’t really want to go to school anyway.”  
He fell silent and chewed his lower lip. Suddenly he asked, very quietly:  
“It’s not gonna be easy, is it?”  
Harold hesitated. What was he going to tell this boy? Of course school wouldn’t be easy for him. If they let him start in third grade, he would be half the age of the other kids, yet even then he would outstrip them all. They would see him as a freak and make his life a misery. And with Spencer’s rather oblique way of approaching people, he would find it difficult to make friends. He wanted to tell Spencer that it was going to be alright, but it would be a lie, and what’s more, the kid would know it. Honesty was the best option, even if it hurt.  
“No, it’s not going to be easy,” he said. “But I think, for you at least, it’s not going to last that long.”  
“I asked Mom if I could be home schooled,” Spencer confided, “but she said it’s important for me to be with other kids. But I don’t want to be with other kids. I don’t like them, and they don’t like me!”  
Harold sighed. He knew exactly how Spencer felt.  
“In a way your mother is right, though,” he said, “it is important to learn how to get along with other people.”  
“I’d rather be alone,” Spencer muttered.  
“Look at it like this: when I was in first grade, someone told me that because the world is full of people, you have to learn about people if you want to understand the world. And people can be very interesting, you know. Why do they do this? Why do they do that? What makes them tick? Don’t you think that would be interesting to find out?”  
Spencer shrugged.  
“Yeah, maybe.”  
“Well, then, in order to study people, you have to be among people. See it as a kind of research project.”  
Spencer nodded, but he didn’t seem convinced.  
“There’s something else,” Harold continued.  
“Even if you haven’t got any friends now, there are people out there who are going to be your friends in the future. Maybe you haven’t come across them yet, but they’re already out there. But you’ll never meet them if you’re alone all the time. You have to be out there, too, you have to be among people, or those friends won’t be able to find you.”  
Spencer looked up at him.  
“You think so?”  
“I know so.”  
Spencer nodded again, but Harold wasn’t sure he believed him. Anyway, Spencer started to walk again, quicker than before, as if he wanted to physically get away from his troubles.  
When they got home again, Spencer played some more with his hexaflexagon, and then Harold let him look through the catalogue of M.C. Escher drawings he had once bought at an exhibition.  
After that they had more sandwiches, and Spencer asked for a bowl of cornflakes, which he ate dry, picking them out of the bowl with his fingers like popcorn. Afterwards, because Spencer had looked with some interest at Harold’s record collection, they listened to one of his Dave Brubeck albums. Finally Harold gave Spencer his Rubik’s cube to play with. That, however, might have been a mistake. Harold suddenly noticed that it was getting rather late, and although Elaine hadn’t returned yet (where was she, anyway?), it was probably past Spencer’s bedtime already. Spencer was engrossed in trying to figure out the Rubik’s cube, and surely didn’t want to go to bed now. Harold knew that his nephew never voluntarily admitted that he was tired. He decided to give it a try though.  
“Spencer,” he said, “I think it’s time for you to go to bed.”  
Spencer stopped fiddling with the cube, but still looked down on it.  
“I suppose,” he conceded. Harold could see that he was torn: he wanted to continue playing with the cube, but he also didn’t want to be naughty and defy Harold.  
“What if I told you that you can keep the cube? You can continue playing with it tomorrow.”  
“Really?”  
“Yes, it’s yours if you want it.”  
“Thank you!”  
Spencer smiled at him, but then he got serious again.  
“I can’t sleep without my pillow,” he told Harold.  
“I’ll give you a pillow.”  
“No, it has to be my pillow! I can’t sleep without my pillow!”  
Was this another excuse for not having to go to bed? No, Harold thought, the boy was serious about it. He clearly needed the one pillow he was used to. But he also needed to sleep.  
“Can I suggest a compromise?” Harold tried. “I’m not asking you to sleep, I’m just asking you to rest a bit. Do you think you can do that without your pillow? Just rest, not sleep.”  
Spencer thought.  
“I suppose,” he said again.  
“You can lie here on the couch,” Harold said, relieved that there wouldn’t be a fight over bedtime.  
He went into his bedroom. His bed was a queensize, and the bedding set came with three pillows, of which he only used one. He grabbed one of the spare ones and took two blankets from the closet.  
When he came back into the living room, Spencer had taken off his shoes, and Harold noticed with amusement that he was wearing mismatched socks: one bright blue, the other with green and orange stripes.  
“I think you might be more comfortable if you took your pants off as well,” he suggested, but Spencer shook his head, and Harold didn’t insist. He spread one of the blankets on the couch to make the surface less bumpy. Once Spencer was lying down with his head on the pillow, Harold covered him with the second blanket.  
He was about to turn the main lights off when Spencer said:  
“Harold, will you read to me?”  
“Of course. I’ll get a book.”  
Harold didn’t take long to choose something he thought suitable. He sat down in the chair next to the couch, opened the book and began:  
“London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not have been wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down…”  
“Megalosaurus was discovered in the 17th century, in the south of England,” Spencer interrupted eagerly, “but they didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t found anywhere else, and it lived in the Middle Jurassic. It didn’t get the name until the 19th century, though. Did you know that people used to think it walked on all fours? But then they found that it walked on two legs, like T-Rex. But no one knows exactly what it looked like because no one has found a complete skeleton.”  
“Well, Dickens seems to think it walked on all fours like a lizard. Maybe he wasn’t up to date with his research. I don’t think it matters, though.”  
“Why not? It’s wrong!”  
Spencer sounded quite distressed by the idea.  
“What Dickens wants is to evoke an amusing picture in the reader’s mind. He thinks that a dinosaur walking down the street is funny. And it’s funny whether it walks on four legs or on two, don’t you think?”  
“Mmh, maybe,” Spencer conceded. “But it’s still wrong.”  
Fortunately this was all Spencer had to say on this topic for the moment, and Harold continued to read. Twenty minutes later Spencer was asleep.  
He didn’t wake up when Elaine finally came to pick him up. And he didn’t wake up when Harold carried him across into Elaine’s apartment and deposited him on the bed in her guest room. He gently took the Rubik’s cube which Spencer had been clutching all this time, and put it down on the dresser, together with Spencer’s hexaflexagon, which he had brought over as well. He made sure the boy’s head was resting on his favored pillow, tucked the blanket around him, and then stood for a few minutes looking down on him.  
He had expected the worst when Elaine had dumped the boy on him with her warning that he wasn’t “quite normal”. (He still hadn’t figured out what she meant by that.) But it had turned out to be a great day. He was glad now that he had gotten to know Spencer. He had come to like the boy a lot. What would the future hold for him? It was impossible to know, Harold thought. Even with the boy he knew best, his nephew, he wouldn’t have liked to make a prediction. Will was brimming over with energy and self-assuredness, but would he grow up to be happy and confident, or arrogant and entitled? And Spencer – he was clearly very talented, but would he find his connection to the world and use his gifts for good, or would he be broken by a world that didn’t understand him and end up isolated and resentful?  
Harold sighed. That’s the trouble with kids, he said to himself: you never know how they’re going to turn out.

**Author's Note:**

> Want to make your own hexaflexagon? Here's the booklet Harold uses: http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/pubs/focus/Gardner_Hexaflexagons12_1956.pdf  
> The book from which Harold reads is "Bleak House". Shame he didn't get very far. I would have loved to hear Spencer's comment on the spontaneous combustion of Mr Krook.


End file.
